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Showing posts from February, 2012

“Functioning Beyond Expectations…”

(*This is a summary of an original paper written with Lt-Col Karen Shakespeare) The loss of identity can be tragic as it can be dramatic; the raw material of rip-roaring novels and films as characters such as Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne rediscover who and what they are. Their lives an edge of the seat odyssey of recovery of self, worthy of a trip to the cinema! The challenge for church, says van Gelder , is to maintain its identity through first understanding its essence, ‘what it is’ (our message), it is then that the church can understand its function, ‘what it does’ (our part in God’s mission), then helping the church fully appreciate its identity or form, ‘how it organises itself’ (as one army).In other words, to avoid an identity crisis, the order is significant, the form of church is directed by what the church does in response to what it is called to be. The first paper in this series argued that training for a future generation needed to be secure in the essence of The Sal

Retaining the Essence: Training for a Future Generation

I have a few articles featured in The Officer Magazine on the Eseence Function and Form of Training and thought I'd stick them up here for those that can be bothered with rather a long winded series for a blog! ----------- Anyone who has lived in London during the last six to eight years will have experienced transition. This transition is from an older way that had lost its efficiency, to a new way that is recapturing the efficiency of old. This transition has been messy and inconvenient. It has had to be well planned and articulated. It started when the problems were realistically acknowledged but seen as not being insurmountable. While the old corroded and decaying Victorian water pipe works still achieve its aim, its brokenness could not be ignored. It leaked; haemorrhaging gallons of water a minute, it didn't achieve what it was created to do. A huge engineering task has stopped and slowed traffic all over London as areas particularly affected are addressed. Huge hol

Buechner on Preaching...

Of course it is the sermons we preach to ourselves around the preachers sermons that are the ones that we hear most powerfully. Frederick Buechner, F(1992) Telling Secrets. pp 85

The Independent story - Rough sleeping in England up by 23 per cent

Check out this article: Rough sleeping in England up by 23 per cent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/rough-sleeping-in-england-up-by-23-per-cent-7420708.html ------Sent from The Independent Sent from my iPad